This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
“Welcome to the laboratory!”
That’s how the artist Ann Craven, 58, greeted me when we met in the stairwell of her archive in Harlem. The space looked like a mausoleum: rows and rows of shelves lined with meticulously labeled boxes.
She took out a box and lifted the lid to reveal 14 paintings individually wrapped in plastic, each the size of a vinyl record and with the same subject: the moon.
Considering the volume of art assembled here, it is hard to imagine that Craven lost nearly everything she had ever made 26 years ago in an electrical fire at her former studio in New York. Like the many artists in Los Angeles now reeling from the Eaton and Palisades fires in January, Craven — who was 32 at the time of the studio fire — had to start over from scratch.
The lone survivor (other than the works that she had previously sold) was a small painting of a deer that was out on loan. Today, she keeps it close, like a talisman, in her TriBeCa studio.
“I had lost everything,” Craven recalled. “So I just started to think about repainting everything I could remember.” The practice of remaking her earlier paintings, which Craven calls “revisitation,” has come to define her career. Today, she is one of America’s most poignant — and misunderstood — artists meditating on memory, time and mortality. If a viewer encounters one or two of her paintings in isolation at a museum or an art fair, it is impossible to grasp what she is really up to.
The serial nature of Craven’s work is the subject of three museum shows opening next month in Maine, where she has spent nearly every summer since 1986. The curator Jamie DeSimone, who spearheaded the effort, acknowledges that Craven’s paintings are sometimes dismissed as kitschy or sentimental because they are nice to look at and capture conventionally feminine motifs like flowers and birds.
“This happens all the time — an artist in midcareer getting dismissed for all the wrong reasons,” DeSimone said.
DeSimone is chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, where she has organized a 30-painting survey, “Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024),” which traces the artist’s variations on key subjects over a five-year period. It opens on May 3 and runs through Jan. 4, 2026.
A companion show at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, “Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory),” from May 22 through Aug. 17, presents a year’s worth of moon paintings from Craven’s laboratory. Students and prominent figures in the Maine art community will be invited to organize rotating displays. The Portland Museum of Art will round out the celebration, with a small show of Craven’s moon and flower paintings, “Spotlight: Ann Craven,” from May 14 to Sept. 14.
It was Craven’s idea to have multiple exhibitions at once. She has done it before: In 2006, she presented 400 paintings of the moon at the New York gallery Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, now shuttered, and 400 hand-painted copies of those works at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The twin exhibitions responded to a show from 1995 that featured 101 moon paintings, most of which burned in the 1999 studio fire. (The handful that had sold out of that show survived.)
DeSimone was skeptical that she and Craven could convince museums to sign on for this summer, since most plan their schedules years in advance. But they were surprisingly receptive.
“Almost all of the museums in Maine have an Ann in their collection,” DeSimone said. The number of concurrent shows references the holy trinity — significant for Craven, who was raised Catholic — and the number of times she typically allows herself to repaint the same image.
Some of these paintings, which could be thought of as siblings, will be shown across two or three of the Maine venues. Craven likened the journey between shows to her own process of repainting. “The time in between going from one venue to the next is the same as in between a stroke — looking at an older painting and looking at a new painting,” she said. (In a 2023 catalog essay, the artist and writer Richard Kalina described Craven’s “revisitations,” which vary in style and scale, as “fraternal rather than identical twins.”)
Maine has long been a haven for artists seeking respite from urban life. On a visit to the region in her late 20s, Craven met Alex Katz, a seasonal Maine resident and a prominent American artist known for his stylish portraits of friends and family. Katz complimented her work, Craven recalled, and wrote her a recommendation for graduate school. (She later worked as his assistant for seven years.) Katz “gave me the courage to paint whatever I wanted,” Craven said.
In 2000, Craven bought a home in Lincolnville, Maine; 16 years later, she bought a vacant church in nearby Thomaston and turned it into a venue for art shows. This summer, she will receive the 2025 Maine in America award from the Farnsworth Art Museum, which honors an individual or organization that has made a meaningful contribution to the state’s arts and culture.
Craven may have painted the moon thousands of times, but she still relishes setting up a row of easels in her Maine backyard as the sun sets, working on as many as five canvases at once while her Boston terriers, Magic and Moonlight, sniff around in the grass. Rather than waiting for the surface to dry, she uses a technique known as wet-on-wet, which allows colors to blur into one another, creating a luscious, almost dreamy effect.
“I was called a lunatic by my grandfather, my uncle,” Craven said proudly (the “lunar” pun was very much intended). “But then they said, ‘Keep going, girl.’”
In New York, Craven’s laboratory — which she moved to a new site in Long Island City after this story was reported — houses not only hundreds of moons, but also nearly every palette she has ever used to make a painting. With the leftover paint on each palette, she creates a corresponding striped canvas, also stored on site. This elaborate system enables her to see how the colors dry and relate to one another so she can more effectively revisit the works later.
Craven’s oeuvre is part of a lineage of contemporary art that makes tangible the passage of time. There is Andy Warhol’s eight-hour slow motion film of the Empire State Building, titled “Empire”; On Kawara’s “Date Paintings,” which consist of nothing but that day’s date; and Nicholas Nixon’s “The Brown Sisters,” a series of photographs the artist took of his wife and her sisters every year for more than three decades.
But unlike many of these artists, Craven has remained steadfastly committed to painting as her chosen medium. “Being a painter and being a conceptual artist was not an easy thing,” she said. “I’m still defending it.”
Art about time is also, invariably, art about death. For Craven, painting, mortality and nature have always been interlinked. Growing up in Boston with a big family, she felt like she was constantly going to funerals. She was drawn to painting flowers in part because she recalled her mother regularly swiping fresh bouquets from the graveyard to bring back home.
“A lot of these revisitations have the memory of a brushstroke from before — that is the same as thinking about the twinkle in my mother’s eye,” Craven said. “I’m still here and I can revisit a painting, but they are never the same.”
In remaking her old work, Craven is not only recording her own existence, but also trying to stretch and bend time — even, perhaps, make herself immortal.
“The laboratory is a mausoleum,” Craven said. “If you don’t believe me now, you’ll believe me when I’m dead, because it’s really there — one long line of what I did.”
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